Bridgeport high schools set goal of leveling playing field

Updated 12:48 am, Sunday, March 3, 2013

Fairfield Warde's #27 Elise Finzi, left, controls the ball as Central's #14 Amanda McKenzie comes in to intercept, during soccer action at Central High School in Bridgeport, Conn. on Tuesday September 21, 2010.

Fairfield Warde's #27 Elise Finzi, left, controls the ball as Central's #14 Amanda McKenzie comes in to intercept, during soccer action at Central High School in Bridgeport, Conn. on Tuesday September 21, 2010.

A baseball team riding a 43-game losing streak ¦ a girls volleyball team with a 23-game losing streak ¦ a boys soccer team that had a 61-game losing streak ¦ a girls soccer team that had a 77-game losing streak ¦ a softball team with a 21-game losing streak.

If you follow or play sports at any one of the three city high schools -- Bassick, Central or Harding -- losing has become the norm. In fact, winning just one game is usually cause for celebration. Participation is way down, athletic budgets have been cut to the bone, facilities and fields are a mess, and because of a lack of youth programs at the middle school level, many of these athletes are only just learning the sport when they reach high school, putting them at a massive disadvantage when it comes to competition.

It's a vicious circle that's been going on in Bridgeport for a long, long time.

"Bridgeport, like a lot of urban areas, is struggling in sports other than boys basketball," said Neil Kavey, the new citywide athletic director for the school system. "It's a question of getting kids sparked and re-interested in sports that they haven't being paying attention to for a while, and I'm not talking about the minor sports, I'm talking about the major sports, too, like football, baseball and softball."

More Information

By the numbersHere are some of the region's high school athletic budgets, which include coaches' stipends, equipment, transportation and other outside revenues:Central, Bassick and Harding $1 million*Staples $1.2 millionWilton $1.08 millionRidgefield $1.2 millionNew Canaan $1.061 millionJoel Barlow $1.164 millionDarien $1.4 million *-Figure is combined for all three schools and approximate.-- CHRIS ELSBERRY

Only boys basketball can be looked at as successful: Central won the Class LL state championship in 2009-10 and, along with Bassick and Harding, puts winning programs on the court practically every season. Bridgeport schools have won the last four FCIAC boys basketball championships, with Bassick and Central splitting the titles.

Other than that? Well, in the fall, the city's three football teams combined for a 4-25 record (one win came via forfeit). Girls volleyball combined to finish 3-51. Boys soccer went 6-38-4. It's a small sample of a recurring trend.

"I think a lot of it is an urban issue. Oftentimes, we're not dealing with the stable home environment," said Kavey, who was a guidance counselor in the district before spending the past seven years as a physical education teacher. He also coached basketball at Joel Barlow High School and Norwalk Tech.

"There's a ton of single-parent homes. And while you might have a great, great parent, logistically, it makes it hard for that parent to get the kids involved in stuff. You don't have that second parent saying, `I know you're a basketball player but it's fall, you're going to play soccer.'

"In terms of transportation, that's tough, too. People get their kids to places in the suburbs, they'll load up a van with four or five kids, We don't have that luxury. Over the course of time, I think that's chipped away at not only sports but other interests as well. We don't have a band here (at Central) anymore. We used to have a great marching band here."

Enter the FCIAC

In 1991, six years into Alan Wallach's 20-year tenure as citywide AD, Bassick, Central and Harding left the MBIAC -- Metropolitan Bridgeport Interscholastic Athletic Conference -- and joined the FCIAC. If there were concerns that the three city schools would not be able to compete against the rest of the league aside from boys basketball, they were well-founded.

Outside of winning 10 league titles in boys basketball, only Central -- which captured a girls basketball title in 1995, a boys soccer crown in 2004 and a football runner-up finish in 2004 and '09 -- has been able to compete against the best the FCIAC has to offer in other sports.

"When I first got in, my goal was to be competitive within the FCIAC," said Wallach, who left the position in 2005. "I knew we couldn't be competitive in all the sports but in most of them. I thought we were pretty competitive in them.

"Things were fairly smooth. We were competitive in a lot of sports, and in some sports, we weren't that competitive, but we did field sports teams in every category. That was one of the things that the FCIAC wanted, they wanted freshman, JV and varsity, so that's what we did. We fielded every sport with the exception I think of probably swimming."

Near the end of August, Kavey replaced James Denton, who had replaced Wallach, as the citywide athletic director. Now six months into the job, Kavey is seeing firsthand just how difficult it is for the three city schools to be competitive in sports besides boys basketball, especially in the always tough FCIAC.

In wrestling, Harding and Central combined for a total of three wins. In girls basketball, Bassick (2-18), Central (5-15) and Harding (2-18) all struggled, although the Hilltoppers showed substantial improvement.

"The girls didn't have a lot of the skill sets that they needed to have so that kind of put us behind a bit," said Central girls' basketball coach Craig Davis.

This season, the Hilltoppers defeated Bullard-Havens Tech and Harding (twice), but also beat McMahon and Norwalk, that final win over the Bears coming on a basket by senior Amanda McKenzie with just 6.4 seconds left.

"We competed in a lot more games this year. We continued to fight," said Davis, who went 2-18 last season. "There were games that we lost by 30, but the fight that they put up in a lot of these games was tremendous and I look forward to capitalizing on that next season. Our goal next season is to win eight games so we can participate in the state tournament."

And while a three-game improvement may not be that great in some circles, it was a huge step for the Hilltoppers.

"For the first time, a lot of the girls did off-season work and I told them that's where the winning will come from," Davis said. "That added to their spirit. Their spirit is tremendous. Our budget in Bridgeport isn't all that great so the girls did fund-raisers this year to buy matching sweats and shirts that made them feel good about themselves."

So did the winning.

"We're progressively getting better," said McKenzie, who finished her high school career with 20 wins and 61 losses at Central. "I think everyone on the team has potential as long as they keep playing year-round, play AAU, play in the summer leagues; it'll come together. We'll build chemistry and get even closer as a team."

Two of the main problems facing the inner-city schools are a lack of basic fundamentals and a lack of youth programs to get these kids more involved in sports at a younger age.

"When you compare the inner-city schools, a lot of the students outside (in the suburbs) have better opportunities," Wallach said. "They're involved in AAU programs. They play outside the traditional season. I know in softball and baseball, a lot of players have their own coaches, they go to batting cages. A lot of the inner-city kids can't do that in the off-season.

"It's not the same as it was. Things have changed."

Attacking the problem

To that end, Kavey and the Board of Education have started a middle school (seventh- and eighth-grade) basketball league -- there are 24 teams, including six girls' teams -- and this month, a new co-ed volleyball league is testing the waters.

"If we can get a lot of these girls to start playing in middle school by the time they get to high school, they're ready to go," McKenzie said. "Most of these girls don't start until we get to high school and it's their first time playing basketball and they don't know the fundamentals, they don't have the basketball IQ, and that brings the team down.

"I wasn't that good when I started (as a freshman), but I had passion and drive. I wanted to get better. I started playing year-round. Every chance I got, I went to the gym. I didn't have any money to get trained, but you never know who's watching and someone came up to me and said he'd train me as long as I kept working hard. So on Saturday and Sunday, I'd get up at 6 a.m. to play until 9, working on my fundamentals and shooting, and I've gotten better. Now, I'm trying to get a lot of the other girls to do what I did because if I can do it, they can do it."

So the focus of the middle school programs will be on skill development.

"We're determined to get them started a little bit earlier," Kavey said. "Our high school people are going to run the (volleyball) league. We're also going to get a seventh- and eighth-grade flag football league going at Kennedy Stadium on Saturdays after the April vacation. And while our superintendent (Paul G. Vallas) is very focused on expanding sports options to kids in every area, from an AD standpoint, I think we first need to shore up the programs that we have that are lacking right now in terms of results.

"We get kids that are coming in the ninth grade that are learning skills that other towns' kids have been doing since fourth grade. So while the freshman or JV softball teams at Harding are working on catching and throwing and actually stepping with the right foot when they throw, at Warde, they might be working on a bunt defense. It's a different animal entirely. A lot of what we do is going to have to be skill-focused."

It's clear that something has to be done to get more city kids involved in sports and skilled enough to compete.

"The middle school sports were stopped some 15 years ago and I really don't know how in-depth those leagues were," Kavey said. "I know there were after-school basketball teams, but I don't know if it extended to any other sports. Kids might have had an open gym after school, but it wasn't a competitive situation or a teaching situation like what we'd like to get going now.

"We have to do what's feasible, obviously, and what logistically makes sense. Volleyball we can run on Saturdays here at Central. Flag football we can run Saturdays here at Central. Softball, which we're going to get into, might take a bit more doing because of field availability; you're not going to do it on Saturday when kids already have a game in the Black Rock Little League. ... It's going to take a little logistical work to get that going."

Eventually, Kavey would like to see every sport that's offered at the high school level being played at the middle school level as well. Wallach agrees.

"I think you really have to have a pretty good middle school program and not just basketball, everything," he said. "Like a track program ¦ a big part of the FCIAC is track. That generates a lot of other sports. Kids that run track usually play another sport, also."

Co-op possibilities

Along with creating middle school leagues to jump-start the learning process, Kavey has spoken with the individual school ADs -- Dan Coleman at Central, Craig Bruno at Bassick and Chris Johnson at Harding -- to gauge interest in possibly co-oping some sports to create a larger talent pool.

"With girls soccer, yes, there is thought right now of co-oping those teams, but there are very definite rules that apply," Kavey said. "Every sport according to the CIAC has a definite number of participants that, if one of the schools can offer more than that number of participants, you can't co-op. I know in soccer, it's 16 because we are looking at (co-oping) girls soccer right now. Bassick and Harding would be the co-op team but if Bassick had 20 kids interested in soccer and Harding had eight, we can't do it.

"You really have to explore the options. We're just getting that going."

Recently, Don Wilson, director of the Bridgeport Youth Lacrosse program, sent out feelers to see if there would be interest in bringing athletes from Harding and Bassick to join the JV program at Central to create a co-op program.

According to Kavey, the response was disappointing.

"I sat down with the ADs at Harding and Bassick and had them beat the bushes to see how many people would be interested and there were four at Harding and none at Bassick," Kavey said. "So, what are you co-oping there? We'll continue to have a JV program at Central. I'm not going to give up on that. Hopefully, somewhere down the road, we can expand it into that (co-op program)."

This year, indoor track and bowling were eliminated at the high school level, and that money is being used to get the middle school programs going. Kavey said that there are no plans -- despite the poor history of many of the other programs -- to drop any more sports.

Kavey, who works with former Bridgeport mayor John Fabrizi, the city's director of adult education, knows that it will take a lot of time and effort, but he is determined to bring Bridgeport high school athletics back to life.

"I'm excited because the people around me, my supervisors, are excited," Kavey said. "The superintendent is hyper-excited. I'm under John (Fabrizi's) wing and so far, pretty much anything I suggest, as long as it's within reason, John's like, `Let's go for it.'"